@Larry I learned, most of all, that welfare was a very destructive system. I saw that almost every teenage girl in town already had a baby but was living at home, turning the baby over to the grandmother while continuing a relatively carefree teenage life. After the second or third child, however, the grandmother would kick her out and she would marry the father of her most recent child. That was how families were formed. I later found by reading Herbert Gutman’s The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom and several other books that this pattern can be traced all the way back through slavery and into African cultural patterns. “Children of fortune” (i.e., children of unknown fathers) were commonplace in slavery and remain so in Africa today. Yet families do form. Eighty percent of the families in Gutman’s plantation records had two parents and the rate of two-parent families among African-Americans living in Harlem in the 1920s was close to 90 percent.
https://spectator.org/wont-somebody-please-help-frances-fox-piven/
